Cath is a fanfic writer beginning her freshman year of college. She's absolutely terrified to be away from home for the first time, especially after her twin sister and best friend, Wren, refuses be her roommate, sticking her with a stranger, Reagan, and Reagan’s perennial hanger-on, Levi. The only place Cath feels at home is in the world of her favorite author, Gemma T. Leslie, spinning new stories for her pre-made characters. She’s not sure she’ll ever be ready to create new characters out of her own deeply private thoughts, let alone open herself up to the uncertainty of feeling something for someone new who doesn’t live inside her head.

The Downside:

Levi can be condescending in ways I found slightly too easily brushed off at points, and the excerpts of Cath’s fanfic can run a bit longer than they need to be in order to complement her story and give insight into her mind, yet not quite long enough to have the chance to suck in the reader in their own right. The book also seems to run out of pages just before the story ends, something I can appreciate in an intentionally ambiguous ending, like Eleanor & Park, but in a story this wholeheartedly hopeful, I could have gone for a bit more closure.

The Upside:

Enough griping.

Fangirl might be the most stunningly accurate depiction of social anxiety I’ve ever encountered in any medium. Cath’s mental patterns, defense mechanisms, and fear of unfamiliar people and situations are presented in a level of vivid yet unembellished detail that anyone who struggles with social anxiety -- or who has ever struggled to understand someone who struggles with social anxiety -- should read.

Cath’s relationship with her father is a major highlight, brimming with mutual love, respect, and support, complicated by the fear that Cath may be inheriting her father’s mental health challenges along with his intensity and wit.

The subjects of fiction writing and fan culture are handled with great care as well, presenting both defenses and criticisms of the concept of fanfiction while discussing the great and worthy challenges of originality. The irreplaceable necessity of connecting with other thinking, feeling people outside the safety of fictional fantasy is a major theme of Cath’s story, yet it coexists harmoniously with a celebration of the positive power of fiction, to inspire, communicate, and even bring people together.

And of course, every one of the many themes Fangirl touches on, from family to first love to creativity to learning styles and the unpredictable uniqueness of each human mind, can be found woven through poignant yet laugh-out-loud blocks of sparklingly quotable dialogue.

​Agree? Disagree? Comments are always welcome (just keep it civil, folks)! Or keep up with my fictional musings by joining me on Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, or by signing up for email updates in the panel on the right!

With Hazel now a toddler, Alana and Marko are doing their best to get by on Alana’s salary from performing on the Open Circuit, but the high-pressure, drug-fueled work environment is starting to get to her, while the loneliness of taking care of things at home is doing much the same to him. Meanwhile, the Brand has taken up the chase for the fugitive family, and Prince Robot the IV’s son being born in his absence is only the beginning of his newest nightmare.

The Downside:

There’s a fantastic moment in which Alana tries to defend her addiction, citing the horrors she’s been through as a soldier and claiming that no one could possibly understand, prompting Izabel to remind her that she understands the costs of war possibly better than anyone.

Izabel is the ghost of half a teenage girl, bound forever to the physical realm after stepping on a landmine. And for reasons unfathomable, Izabel’s hanging, severed entrails, which by now are such a normal part of her appearance that it’s easy to forget they’re there, are out of frame in this panel which would otherwise be a beautifully horrible moment to re-notice them.

This tiny choice in the composition of the artwork for a moment that remains powerful anyway is all the negative commentary I can offer.

The Upside:

The kidnapping of Prince Robot’s son, by a crazed victim of the Robot Empire’s horrific class struggle, may be the best example yet of Saga’s ability to blur the line between heroes and villains, making opposing sides conflictingly relatable.

As for Alana and Marko, this is that standard chapter of an extended romance where the relationship itself, the one good thing that has thus far stood against all adverse circumstances, is called into question.

Only it’s not that standard chapter, because those chapters are awful, and this is Saga, the farthest possible thing from awful.

Those are the chapters when characters hitherto known for their steadfastness suddenly receive total personality transplants and begin lying to each other for no reason and making life-ending extrapolations from the tiniest of irritations, while the audience throws things at the pages or screen, checks their email, and waits for the happy couple to get over it.

Alana and Marko’s issues come from the reality of struggling to raise a child together in the poverty, pressure, and isolation of their fugitive status. They’re living the romantic happy ending of running away from it all together, and discovering that it’s not all that perfectly happy.

The drift between them, the breakdown of their trust, is so natural and yet so weighty and devastating, that it’s almost possible to believe that the core of the series -- their marriage -- might actually be over. The worst parts of both of them, not abrupt changes to their characters but elements that have been hinted at from the start, surface catastrophically. They both cross real lines, but because it’s both of them, and because of the solid foundation they once built between them, it’s easy to root for that reconciliation with a fervor so many breakup chapters can only dream of inspiring.
​

Agree? Disagree? Comments are always welcome (just keep it civil, folks)! Or keep up with my fictional musings by joining me on Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, or by signing up for email updates in the panel on the right!

After R’s return to life from zombiehood and the cascade of change his recovery has sparked in all of zombiekind, the world is in a delicate state of flux, its population on the verge of reclaiming its humanity on a colossal scale.

And the evil doesn’t like that at all.

This time, the forces of order through destruction and domination take a new form, no longer flesheating skeletons but a continent-wide network of insincerely smiling suits who call themselves the Axiom Group, determined to control or eliminate the resurrection power that seems to stem from R and Julie’s love. Along with their few surviving friends, the pair take off in search of some way to preserve what they’ve only begun to build together, but Axiom is dangerous for more than its weapons and numbers. It carries a connection to the pre-zombie life that R can’t remember and doesn’t want. Fighting Axiom means allowing its secrets to resurface from the basement of his mind, secrets that threaten to overwrite the very life he’s trying to hold onto.

The Downside:

The Burning World is decidedly more meandering than its predecessor. The frequent interludes narrated by the collective consciousness of all accumulated human experience are sometimes insightful and do include some plot setup for the end, but their quantity when combined with the more essential flashbacks to R’s first life slow the forestory down severely in places. It doesn’t help that much of that forestory, when we do get back to it, is taken up with our heroes rehashing new permutations of the same argument about the fact that they have no solid plan.

Abram, the group’s newest ally of convenience, constantly belittling and overruling Julie gets particularly grating, especially when he’s routinely right about her ideas being fickle and unhelpful. The ultimate point is the good one that everyone is uncertain, flailing in the dark, and making things up as they go just as much as R is, Julie included, and R can love her even better as a flawed, human equal than as an ideal on a pedestal, but this directionless flailing, however realistic, is unsatisfying in a narrative, and is only resolved in time for a lead-in to the third and final book, rather than a climax of its own. Meanwhile, this validated dismissal of the primary female character’s input seems to run counter to the general message of universal human respect, as do a few other small instances.

There’s a moment when R insists on running into a seemingly suicidal fight, asks Julie to stay behind out of danger, and leaves her with the thought that “she’ll either respect my wishes, or she won’t.” She doesn’t, of course, and he doesn’t hold this against her, but the hypocrisy of his hope that she will “respect his wishes” for her safety in the exact moment he’s disregarding her identical wishes for his, is never called out, so it’s difficult to tell whether such a moment is an excessively subtle piece of the overall commentary, or simply a contradiction that slipped by.

The Upside:

For all that, The Burning World makes abundantly clear where its heart lies, and it earns an A still bordering on an A+ for the weight of its content combined with the sheer poetry of its execution -- no less than readers have learned to expect of Isaac Marion.

R’s trek through both his present and past is a harrowing, blistering tour of every excuse ever concocted to deny a person’s humanity, or the value of humanity’s better nature altogether.

Because I have my own family to worry about first.

Because I’m too small to help.

Because God wants it this way.

Because there is no God, or any other form of purpose or point, so we might as well take what we please from whoever has it.

Because the fact that I have more than someone else must somehow prove that I did something to deserve it.

Because I am a real person, and they, for whatever quibbling difference of biology or geography, are not.

And so on.

This is the story of an ex-zombie, an ex-nothing, who thought all he wanted was to be a person with a life and now must decide what kind of person he is and what to do with that life. It’s the story of a man trying to build an identity in a world that largely considers masculinity and humanity to be synonymous, and measures both by one’s ability to establish a distinction of “us versus them” and cling to the winning side of it. It’s about the strength it takes to step back from that quickest route to feeling like a person and say no, I can do better than that.

The Burning World builds on Warm Bodies’ unique critique of the zombie genre’s usual hyper-indulgence of the instinct to dehumanize an enemy, developing the concept into a brutal and timely skewering of apathy, greed, and rationalized cruelty, while rooting itself back in the original’s celebration of life, of connection, communication, love, and the determination to create something better than what was there before. These are still the cure to unfeeling, unthinking, ever-consuming zombiehood itself.

At the same time, this remains a deeply personal story as well, pushing R and Julie’s relationship past the rush of first discovering each other and into the challenge of balancing and bridging their separate private struggles and impossible hopes for themselves.

Through all the themes large and small, the prose is, as ever, lyrical yet direct, unapologetically passionate, and able to make even the most obvious and universal of feelings fresh and new.

While Warm Bodies is the more satisfyingly self-contained read, and one I would recommend to anyone, I second Marion’s assertion that The Burning World can be read out of order. And maybe it can’t wait for the time it takes to catch up. As he says, this is a book for now.

Agree? Disagree? Comments are always welcome (just keep it civil, folks)! Or keep up with my fictional musings by joining me on Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, or by signing up for email updates in the panel on the right!

By now, most readers of this blog are probably vaguely aware of the split with Jolly Fish Press, and the process Matt and I have been going through, republishing our books after the rights reversion.

Well, we're not the only ones, and today I'm spotlighting a re-release by Elsie Park. The new edition of her historical romance, Shadows of Valor, releases in ebook form today, and in paperback on the 28th!

And yes, it's got a pretty new cover too :)

About Shadows of Valor:

Something dark stirs within the peaceful walls of the prosperous town of Graywall, something only the mysterious knight-spy known as The Shadow can overcome. Torn between a sense of justice and a desire for revenge, The Shadow is the nobleman Sir Calan, who must use his skills to assist the Lord of Graywall. When Sir Calan is sent to hunt down smugglers who have run rampant after the levying of a harsh tax by King Edward, he learns of a plot against the just ruler of the town, Lord Shaufton. To thwart this plot, Calan enters a pseudo courtship with Shaufton's daughter under the guise of Sir Calan, even as he wrestles with emotions stirred by the lovely Elsbeth, Lord Shaufton's niece. Elsbeth may be the only person who can heal Calan's troubled soul, but she has secrets of her own. Rife with deceit, greed, and betrayal, Shadow of Valor is a timeless tale of honor, love, and redemption.

About Elsie Park:

Elsie Park grew up in a small town outside Yosemite National Park, California and now lives in Utah. In college Elsie studied zoology, botany, and criminal justice. She’s worked as a wildland firefighter and a police officer, and loves thinking up new ideas for interesting stories and composing music to go with those stories. Shadows of Valor is first novel, with the sequel, The Perils of Wrath, due for release in 2018.

The Basics:
On the night of a Christmas Eve blizzard, Jubilee is trapped in a strange town after her parents’ arrest, Tobin and his two best friends embark on a quest for a Waffle House full of cheerleaders, and Addie is determined to prove her capacity for selflessness at least to her friends, if not to the ex she can’t let go. The three searches for love, each written by a different rightly renowned YA author, interlock and collide amid holiday miracles.

The Downside:

The last story of the three, Addie’s, falls into the unfortunate role of having to tie all the threads together for the others, making it the weakest in its own right, and leaving Addie’s personal epiphany feeling as though it’s sparked simply by reaching the point in her arc where she’s supposed to have an epiphany, rather than by natural progression.

The use of a Waffle House full of snowed-in cheerleaders as the unifying ingredient across the three stories doesn’t always come across quite as sensitively as is clearly the intent. After seeing them used as a symbol and canvas for several other characters to project their differing attitudes, I would have loved to see the multi-perspective format used to take us inside the life of one of the cheerleaders to see how she views herself, but no such luck.

The ultimate message seems to be that they’re not mystical creatures, they’re not property to be controlled, and that the coolest girls are the non-cheerleaders who don’t allow themselves to be used as sexual accessories to the more respected exploits of boys, which is all good stuff. However, the female perspective to this effect rings a bit hollow when the characters providing it are always in a position of jealousy, and the male dehumanization of the cheerleaders is harder to accept as the curable youthful ignorance and lack of communication it’s meant to be when those male characters are endowed with all the intellect, perceptiveness, and perspicacity required to deliver John Green dialogue.

The Upside:

Whatever accidental inconsistencies they may cause in the characters’ social awareness and aptitude, John Green’s sharp wit and evident heart are as enjoyable as ever in Tobin’s struggle with the terrifying prospect of taking a chance on the female best friend he loves, rather than searching for the next pretty girl he’s not afraid to lose. Lauren Myracle brings her usual vivid rendering of high school friendship in spite of the confines of the final story, and Maureen Johnson (the one whose other work I’m least familiar with), starts things off with a bang, or rather, with a double-dose of the humor and genuine sweetness that runs throughout all three storylines.

While the three stories are each capable of standing alone (the first two especially), and all three authors play to their own strengths, occasionally even with some gentle fun poked at each other, the snowed-in town and the tone of romantic holiday spirit are seamlessly cohesive.

Let It Snow is like a smaller scale, teenage version of Love, Actually, without the inexplicable fat jokes or creepy theme of powerful men exploiting female subordinates, but with all the unabashedly heartstring-tugging sentimentality and double the smiles.

Pity this review is going up in February, thanks to receiving the book as a perfect Christmas present, but… belated Valentine’s Day reading, anyone?

​Agree? Disagree? Comments are always welcome (just keep it civil, folks)! Or keep up with my fictional musings by joining me on Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, or by signing up for email updates in the panel on the right!

The little fugitive family of Alana, Marko, baby Hazel, and Isabel the undead babysitter expands with some growing pains to include Marko’s parents, while the original courtship and escape of Alana and Marko from their opposite sides of the conflict is recounted in more detail. Meanwhile, reeling from the recent murder of his on-and-off true love, The Will (with a The), one of the mercenaries formerly pursuing the family, joins forces with Marko’s vengeful ex and agrees to carry on the hunt, in exchange for her help rescuing a six-year-old from indentured prostitution. Prince Robot IV also continues his search for the family, knowing his father won’t allow him to return home to his pregnant wife until his mission is complete, with only a copy of Alana’s favorite book as a clue to their course.

The Downside:

For the sake of finding one, the excerpts given of Alana’s book, the secretly subversive one she and Marko first bonded over and the inspiration for their ship’s current heading, seem to come from a bland melodrama. But even that may an intentional part of the point, reflecting the way recognizing and sharing the value in a book sometimes requires the willingness to sound like a crazy person to anyone who’s only seen said book’s ordinary or even silly-looking surface.

The Upside:

Alana and Marko continue to be the lovable couple you’re compelled to root for, both in flashback and in their more complicated present, where they’re faced with reconciling their sudden union with the in-laws. Marko’s parents are both loving and badass, but carry the prejudices of a generations-long war full of atrocities on both sides. The friction around the news of their son’s interspecies marriage isn’t shrugged off easily, and Alana acquits herself with all the self-respect and sardonic wit we’ve come to expect of her, but ultimately the desire to stay close wins out, forcing all the lifelike patience, trust, and annoyance that comes with family.

As usual, the backdrop of all manner of sci-fi crazy does absolutely nothing to detract from the down-to-earth relatability of the characters and their struggle. Sure, this is an illegal mixed marriage in wartime. Sure, for them, the family thing is “complicated.” But the implication is, isn’t it always?

It’s sure complicated for The Will, with his new partner of convenience, their sort of adopted new six-year-old, and their lie-detecting cat, who cuts to the heart of whatever the group tries to cover or embellish with more efficiency than paragraphs of internal monologue could manage.

It’s complicated for Prince Robot IV, who’s trying to swallow his crippling PTSD and do whatever’s necessary to satisfy his father and get home to his wife.

And as a result, it’s intensely, nail-bitingly complicated for the reader, figuring out what to feel for these characters who do terrible things for inescapably understandable reasons, chasing stakes we can’t root against, at the expense of characters we can root against even less.

This is the paradox that continues to make Saga truly un-put-downable.

Agree? Disagree? Comments are always welcome (just keep it civil, folks)! Or keep up with my fictional musings by joining me on Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, or by signing up for email updates in the panel on the right!

Simon Snow is the Chosen One, destined to save the World of Mages from the Insidious Humdrum and the brewing war between the elitist old families and the Mage who runs Watford school. If only Simon could get his explosive level of power under control. And maybe figure out how to make his girlfriend happy. And uncover what's up with Baz, his vampire roommate, the rival with whom he’s been nursing an obsessive mutual enmity since they were eleven.

The Downside:

The world of Carry On started as the subject of fanfiction in another Rainbow Rowell book, Fangirl, and the vestigially fanfic-y quality of the setup makes the characters a little difficult to connect with in their own right at first (what's with Harry Potter analogue characters always being named Simon, anyway?). Rowling doesn’t have a monopoly on stories about learning magic, of course, but some of the details here are distractingly specific.

The Upside:

Both the characters and world do eventually assert their uniqueness, and it's a beautiful thing when they do. Every conflict, personal or political, is explored on all sides with extraordinary finesse. The status-quo of the World of Mages is prejudicial and wrong, yet the loudest and therefore most influential revolutionary is half-mad and quick to jump to tactics that do more harm than good. There are good people and good intentions to be found on all sides of the fence, including in the camp that simply wants to run far away.

We get to hear what it’s like to be a chosen one waiting to die, trying to minimize the collateral damage, and yet privately clinging to the hope of a happily ever after he can’t even think about starting to build yet. We hear from the love interest who’d rather be at home away from magic and looming war, living her own story in the now, rather than continuing to be used in evil plot after evil plot as hostage or incentive for the Chosen One, on the promise of a chance to be his happy ending, if he ever gets there. And yet, she cares for him. We hear from the brilliant sidekick who throws herself into every adventure and never looks back. We hear from the generation past, who thought they were doing the right thing. We hear from the guy born into the elitist old money culture who knows that he’s growing into more than one thing his family hates, but the love of family remains, sweet and complicated and unresolvable.

Wrap all of that in a sincerely believable, Rainbow Rowell-grade forbidden romance, and Carry On is a masterpiece both as genre commentary and as a story to stand alone, in equal measure.

Agree? Disagree? Comments are always welcome (just keep it civil, folks)! Or keep up with my fictional musings by joining me on Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, or by signing up for email updates in the panel on the right!

This week, I get to welcome Johnny Worthen himself back to my blog to celebrate! As a fellow author of series fiction, and having yet to see publication of a final installment myself, I knew exactly the question I had to ask today...

How does it feel to be finishing The Unseen series and saying goodbye to the characters?

Releasing books is always an emotional event. One of my coping mechanisms has always been (not surprisingly) to write about it. I’ll be posting “Letting Go of David” on my blog when it gets closer and I feel the full emotional impact. Probably next week or the one after. It’s coming. I can feel it building up.

Until that critical mass outburst, I can at least say that this book does indeed feel different from my others. I wrote the Unseen trilogy many moons ago. I had the entire series written before the first book, Eleanor, hit the shelves back in 2014, so the process of creating the series is now dim and colored by its success. It’s been a part of my life for a long time now, my claim to fame, my best-seller, my most talked about. Those are the feelings that are beginning to bubble up, but in the meantime, I have to say that reading the series again as I have, I feel the ending of the series as a fan would.

Just outside my control, beyond my recollection of creation, I read these characters as old friends and rejoice in their triumphs and mourn their defeats.

Change. It’s all about change. The theme of the series. The painful but necessary evolution of character and idea and lives. Survival at cost, affection at debt. Experiencing the end of the arc carries me through the gambit of emotions as I hope it will others.

Eleanor’s adventures in David are different from the previous books’. A necessary adaptation, as is only proper. Eleanor’s changed. The world has changed. The hated are loved, the loved have betrayed.

It is a bitter-sweet ending. A culmination of the promises made throughout and the direct descendant of first chapter of the first book. The rise, fall, and rise of a broken, flawed, suffering girl, inhuman, lonely and lost.

This series always stirs me, has been known to bring me to tears. David is no different. Having an ending now only sharpens the edge. But it’s all good. An ending is change and change is inevitable. And if Eleanor has taught me nothing else, it’s that change though painful and terrible, can be noble.

About David:

"You and no other."Flames and blood – the story of Eleanor's existence.

How can she recover? How can she go on? How can she stay away?

Eleanor survives, it what she does. But at what cost? She learns her past and sees the terrible and tragic history of her kind, the wreckage of fear and necessity spread across generations of innocent lives. It is enough to show her she is toxic, a cause of pain and destruction. For everyone’s own good, she will disappear forever.

But first, one last visit to Jamesford.

The sleepy Wyoming town mourns their lost child. The unremarkable girl who in life wanted only to be ignored is a celebrity in death, a tourist attraction, a legend. A mystery.

But not everyone thinks she’s dead. While some wait in hope for her return, others wait in ambush.

About Johnny Worthen

“I write what I like to read,” says Johnny. “That guarantees me at least one fan.”

Johnny Worthen is an award-winning, best-selling author, voyager, and damn fine human being! He is the tie-dye wearing writer of the nationally acclaimed, #1 Kindle best-selling Eleanor, The Unseen. Among his other excellent and very read-worthy titles are the adult occult thriller Beatrysel, the award-winning mystery The Brand Demand, and the genre bending comedy-noir The Finger Trap. And of course the continuation of The Unseen Trilogy, with Celeste and David.

Trained in stand-up comedy, modern literary criticism and cultural studies, Johnny is a frequent public speaker, teacher and blogger. He’s an instructor at the University of Utah and an acquisitions editor for Omnium Gatherum, a publisher of unique dark fantasy, weird fiction and horror.

Note: David is the third installment in the Unseen trilogy. Click the links to check out my reviews of the first two books, Eleanor and Celeste.

(Disclosure: I received a free advance copy of David from the publisher in exchange for an honest review. The book hits shelves August 16th, 2016)

The Basics:

After surviving the collision of every kind of angry mob Jamesford has to offer, Eleanor has been careful not to break the illusion that she died in the flames, so as not to bring any more pain and death to the people who dare to be kind to her. After months in hiding, however, she’s drawn back to Jamesford once more. To watch, to connect, or to say goodbye, she hasn’t decided yet.

The Downside:

Eleanor’s fit of masochistic self-pity, during which she refuses to go back to David for her own sake, or to consider for a moment that he might deserve a say in whether his life is better or worse with her in it, drags on for about half the book. Admittedly, this method of extending romantic tension is a particular peeve of mine and may work better for other readers, but it does make the first act feel a bit stagnant, and considering that this final installment of the trilogy is named for David, he’s disappointingly absent from most of it.

The Upside:

Midge, on the other hand, gets plenty of time to shine this book, and does so brightly. She’s the friend everyone should have to turn to. On a larger scale, the optimistic support of most of the town of Jamesford, which disagrees on the truth about Eleanor but mostly agrees on missing and caring about her, is a refreshing contrast to Eleanor’s doom-and-gloom natural wariness.

Eleanor’s shapeshifting is finally used to full effect in her covert return to Jamesford, hiding in plain sight and righting wrongs, and once she finally makes her choice about her own life, she’s the hero the series has always hinted she could be, with a thrilling final rescue mission to match. The tragedy of the sweet wallflower crushed by small town malice is over. Eleanor takes possession at last of her story and her powers.

Break out the tissues, our shy little shapeshifter is all grown up!

​

Agree? Disagree? Comments are always welcome! Or keep up with my fictional musings by joining me on Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, or by signing up for email updates in the panel on the right!

Cinder is a cyborg mechanic (a mechanic who is a cyborg, not a mechanic who repairs cyborgs) in futuristic New Beijing. Her cyborg status keeps her the legal property of her wicked stepmother, and few who discover what she is are willing to entertain the possibility that her mechanically patched brain remains capable of human emotion. With the help of a faulty robot, Iko, and her little stepsister, Peony, Cinder plots her escape, but a deadly plague, a looming war with the Lunar people, and a growing friendship under false pretenses with Prince Kai all threaten to derail her plans.

The Downside:

The Cinderella story is decidedly unfinished at the cliffhanger ending, which might not be so terrible in the context of a series (which I have not finished), but the second book’s change of protagonist certainly underscores said cliffhanger’s abruptness. Cinder’s cyborg elements, while a constant presence in her life, could also have been taken better advantage of. It’s clear from the beginning that Cinder thinks and feels exactly like a human and is held back only by physical and social disadvantages. While the ultimate message that Cinder is the equal of the humans around her is crucial, the effects of her artificial wiring on her daily functioning could have been a fascinating angle for exploration. Her programming includes and built-in lie detector, for example, which could have allowed for some wonderfully telling scenes of dialogue but isn’t used for much other than foiling the evil plot.

The Upside:

Cinder draws heavy inspiration from the source fairytale but doesn’t allow itself to be confined by it. The wicked stepmother is sufficiently horrifying, while the relationship between Cinder and Peony, her one not-at-all-wicked stepsister, adds both much needed sweetness and complexity to her home life. Both Cinder and Prince Kai are likeable, both doing their best at handling the separate but occasionally intersecting challenges and horrors of their lives, Kai his ascension to ruling a plague-ravaged and politically unstable country, Cinder her enslavement and forced medical testing as a cyborg. Their romance is easy to root for in the face of the diverging courses their subplots take, and never does it reduce either of them to the faceless prize of a fairytale prince or the girl who cares about nothing but going to the ball.

Effective as sci-fi, as fairytale, and as a series intro, this one has me eager to catch up on the rest.

Agree? Disagree? Comments are always welcome! Or keep up with my fictional musings by joining me on Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, or by signing up for email updates in the panel on the right!